Monster

Monster – A low-budget horror picture, Monster (2008) contains the germ of a very good film that was unfortunately not made. Two shapely young women travel to Tokyo to make a documentary on global warming. While interviewing the Minister of the Environment, some kind of tentacle-monster erupts from under the city and begins destroying everything. The young women hide in a variety of underground locations – sewers, caves, steam-tunnels. After various misadventures, they reach the American embassy, alas, now in ruins. The monster emerges from the darkness and, presumably, kills the girls. The film is based on The Blair Witch Project – in other words, it uses very severely distorted, tremulous hand-held video footage, allegedly retrieved from a camcorder found on the wrecked streets of Tokyo. At times, the picture resembles a Stan Brakhage film – the shots are very short, poorly lit or filled with glare, and the image frequently explodes into pixels or freezes into color saturated panels. (I have no idea why a cam-corder would distort images in this way and, although the effects are, often, picturesque, they strain credulity and, generally, appear designed to obscure the fact that the film was made with no budget, almost no actors, very few extras, and only a couple of cheesy-looking pyrotechnic effects – explosions that look much bigger than they were.) The women emote convincingly and seem genuinely distressed for much of the film and there are some realistic-looking injuries but, overall, the effect is both depressing – it’s too “realistic” to be amusing – and, completely, forgettable. Ten minutes after the movie is over, your reaction is “so what?” The film is produced by something called Asylum Group, a company that seems to specialize in bargain-basement apocalypse and the trailers for other pictures released by the studio, or whatever it is, look interesting – probably more interesting than the films themselves. Monster suggests an interesting idea: filmed with a shaky camera in quick, disorienting and poorly lit shots, images breaking up into pixels suggest the end of the world no matter what those pictures actually, objectively, show. This means that someone could take shots of any city street and process them to reveal a hidden structure of anxiety and fear – perhaps, the world is always ending. We just can’t see it. Monster suggests that the apocalypse is interstitial to ordinary reality – it’s just a matter of looking edgewise at the world. This is how I thought Monster was structured – that is, wholly innocuous images cut into a context to suggest a dire and apocalyptic plot. But, unfortunately, the movie is not that interesting. A “making of…” feature on the DVD reveals the director staging car accidents, unleashing small explosions, and directing 12 or 15 extras to dark this way or that in the back alleys of LA, In other words, the mayhem shown in the film is not “found,” an objet trouve extracted from banal imagery – rather, it is all unconvincingly staged.